Mike Ruane, President and CEO, Revelation Software
With the year 2020 now mercifully behind us, we at Revelation are seeing a landscape that hasn’t changed much from what we had to adapt to when the pandemic first struck. When lockdowns and restrictions initially occurred, we, and our customers, had to scramble to figure out how to enable our employees and customers to get done what needed to get done … but not from their usual offices.
What are the major effects we see? The changes made last year that have affected so many offices, employees, and users are probably going to remain in place for a long time. Working from home had been a nice, occasional perk for a few workers who were able to do their jobs on the phone and computer. Now, it’s become the new normal for anyone who does not need to work on specific machinery at a specific place. The pandemic has accelerated certain trends, and “working from anywhere” is one of them.
What challenges are there with such a change? From the database point of view, database accessibility and security are paramount. Revelation has responded by continuing our development of internet connectivity tools, allowing distributed database access as well as browser-based user interfaces.
The changing landscape focused our priorities on some existing projects—such as improving our ability to use an OpenInsight client with a cloud database and developing a secure RESTful API toolkit.
These changes will make it easier for organizations to migrate their application data to the cloud while still being able to leverage their OpenInsight-based applications so they have the best of both worlds. And, for the multi-member development teams, we have enhanced our support and integration with Git, increasing the efficiency and productivity of those teams.
It’s been a tumultuous time, and while we hope everything will go back to the way it was before the pandemic, we know that it probably won’t. As we always try to do, Revelation will adapt to the changing needs of our users, customers, and developers, keeping their applications working and relevant.